Determining user personality characteristics from social networking system communications and characteristics

ABSTRACT

A social networking system obtains linguistic data from a user&#39;s text communications on the social networking system. For example, occurrences of words in various types of communications by the user in the social networking system are determined. The linguistic data and non-linguistic data associated with the user are used in a trained model to predict one or more personality characteristics for the user. The inferred personality characteristics are stored in connection with the user&#39;s profile, and may be used for targeting, ranking, selecting versions of products, and various other purposes.

BACKGROUND

Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to socialnetworking and, more specifically, to determining users' personalitycharacteristics based on their communications in connection with thesocial networking system.

Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connectionsbetween users (including people, businesses, and other entities), havebecome prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social networkingsystem allows users to more efficiently communicate information that isrelevant to their friends or other connections in the social network.Social networks typically incorporate a system for maintainingconnections among users in the social network and links to content thatare likely to be relevant to the users. Social networks also collect andmaintain information about the users of the social network. Thisinformation may be static, such as geographic location, employer, jobtype, age, music preferences, interests, and a variety of otherattributes, or it may be dynamic, such as tracking a user's actionswithin the social network. This information can then be used to targetinformation delivery so that information more likely to be of particularinterest to a user can be communicated to that user.

Typical social networking systems select content for a user based oninformation provided by the user and stored in a user profile and/orbased on actions performed by the user and logged by the socialnetworking system. Additional information about other users connected tothe user may be used to further refine content selection. However, auser's personality also affects how the user interprets event or contentand provides insights into how the user will react to new content or tocontext changes. Although user personality may be inferred based on userinteractions with online communication channels, conventional socialnetworking systems do not attempt to infer user personalitycharacteristics from user interactions with the social networkingsystems.

SUMMARY

A social networking system obtains linguistic data from textcommunications generated by the user as well as characteristics of theuser maintained by the social networking system. Based on the linguisticdata and the characteristics, the social networking system predicts oneor more personality characteristics of the user. The inferredpersonality characteristics are stored in a user profile for the userand then used to select content for presentation to the user.

Linguistic data is extracted from one or more of a plurality of types ofcommunications between the user and one or more additional users of thesocial networking system. Types of communications may include statusupdates, notes, messages, posts, comments, or any other communicationsfrom which linguistic data may be extracted, and the communication mayoccur within the social networking system or outside of it and thenprovided to the social networking system. Because different types ofcommunications are presented to different groups of users, extractinglinguistic data from a variety of types of communications better enablesthe linguistic data to identify personality characteristics of the user.The linguistic data may indicate a percentage of words, or word stems,from the communications between the users and one or more additionalusers that are in various categories.

In addition to linguistic data, one or more characteristics of the userare retrieved from a user profile associated with the user. Examples ofcharacteristics include: an age, a gender, a number of additional usersconnected to the user, a percentage of connections to other usersinitiated by the user, a presence of a profile picture in the userprofile, a number of times the user accesses the social networkingsystem within a specified time interval, a number of communications fromthe user having different communication types, a frequency with whichthe user creates different communication types, a total number ofcommunications generated by the user, a percentage of communicationsgenerated by the user having different types of communication, and anumber of unique days the user generated communications having varioustypes of communication. One or more models are applied to the linguisticdata and the one or more characteristics to identify personalitycharacteristics associated with, or likely to be associated with, theuser. Examples of personality characteristics include: extroversion,agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness.

The identified personality characteristics are stored in the user's userprofile and are used to select content for presentation to the user. Forexample, the identified personality characteristics may be used alongwith other information to select news stories, advertisements, orrecommendations of actions presented to the user. By using personalitycharacteristics when selecting content, the social networking systemincreases the likelihood that the user will favorably interact with theselected content.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a system environment in which a socialnetworking system operates, in accordance with an embodiment of theinvention.

FIG. 2 is a block diagram of a social networking system, in accordancewith an embodiment of the invention.

FIG. 3 shows a flow chart of one embodiment of a method for determininguser personality characteristics, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe invention.

The figures depict various embodiments of the present invention forpurposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readilyrecognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments ofthe structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed withoutdeparting from the principles of the invention described herein.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

System Architecture

FIG. 1 is a high level block diagram illustrating a system environment100 for a social networking system 140. The system environment 100comprises one or more client devices 110, a network 120, one or morethird-party websites 130 and the social networking system 140. Inalternative configurations, different and/or additional components maybe included in the system environment 100. The embodiments describedherein can be adapted to online systems that are not social networkingsystems.

The client devices 110 comprise one or more computing devices capable ofreceiving user input as well as transmitting and/or receiving data viathe network 120. In one embodiment, a client device 110 is aconventional computer system, such as a desktop or laptop computer. Inanother embodiment, a client device 110 may be a device having computerfunctionality, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), mobiletelephone, smart-phone or similar device. A client device 110 isconfigured to communicate via the network 120. In one embodiment, aclient device 110 executes an application allowing a user of the clientdevice 110 to interact with the social networking system 140. Forexample, a client device 110 executes a browser application to enableinteraction between the client device 110 and the social networkingsystem 140 via the network 120. In another embodiment, a client device110 interacts with the social networking system 140 through anapplication programming interface (API) that runs on the nativeoperating system of the client device 110, such as IOS® or ANDROID™.

The client devices 110 are configured to communicate via the network120, which may comprise any combination of local area and/or wide areanetworks, using both wired and wireless communication systems. In oneembodiment, the network 120 uses standard communications technologiesand/or protocols. Thus, the network 120 may include links usingtechnologies such as Ethernet, 802.11, worldwide interoperability formicrowave access (WiMAX), 3G, 4G, CDMA, digital subscriber line (DSL),etc. Similarly, the networking protocols used on the network 120 mayinclude multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), transmission controlprotocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP),hypertext transport protocol (HTTP), simple mail transfer protocol(SMTP) and file transfer protocol (FTP). Data exchanged over the network120 may be represented using technologies and/or formats includinghypertext markup language (HTML) or extensible markup language (XML). Inaddition, all or some of links can be encrypted using conventionalencryption technologies such as secure sockets layer (SSL), transportlayer security (TLS), and Internet Protocol security (IPsec). The thirdparty website 130 may be coupled to the network 120 for communicatingwith the social networking system 140, which is further described belowin conjunction with FIG. 2.

FIG. 2 is an example block diagram of an architecture of the socialnetworking system 140. The social networking system 140 includes a userprofile store 205, a content store 210, an action logger 215, an actionlog 220, an edge store 230, a user personality estimator 235, and a webserver 240. In other embodiments, the social networking system 140 mayinclude additional, fewer, or different components for variousapplications. Conventional components such as network interfaces,security functions, load balancers, failover servers, management andnetwork operations consoles, and the like are not shown so as to notobscure the details of the system architecture.

Each user of the social networking system 140 is associated with a userprofile, which is stored in the user profile store 205. A user profileincludes declarative information about the user that was explicitlyshared by the user, and may also include profile information inferred bythe social networking system 140. In one embodiment, a user profileincludes multiple data fields, each data field describing one or moreattributes of the corresponding user of the social networking system140. The user profile information stored in user profile store 205describes the users of the social networking system 140, includingbiographic, demographic, and other types of descriptive information,such as work experience, educational history, gender, hobbies orpreferences, location and the like. A user profile may also store otherinformation provided by the user, for example, images or videos. Incertain embodiments, images of users may be tagged with identificationinformation of users of the social networking system 140 displayed in animage. A user profile in the user profile store 205 may also maintainreferences to actions by the corresponding user performed on contentitems in the content store 210 and stored in the action log 220.

While user profiles in the user profile store 205 are frequentlyassociated with individuals, allowing people to interact with each othervia the social networking system 140, user profiles may also be storedfor entities such as businesses or organizations. This allows an entityto establish a presence on the social networking system 140 forconnecting and exchanging content with other social networking systemusers. The entity may post information about itself, about its productsor provide other information to users of the social networking systemusing a brand page associated with the entity's user profile. Otherusers of the social networking system may connect to the brand page toreceive information posted to the brand page or to receive informationfrom the brand page. A user profile associated with the brand page mayinclude information about the entity itself, providing users withbackground or informational data about the entity.

The content store 210 stores objects representing various types ofcontent. Examples of content represented by an object include a pagepost, a status update, a photo, a video, a link, a shared content item,a gaming application achievement, a check-in event at a local business,a brand page, or any other type of content. Objects may be created byusers of the social networking system 140, such as status updates,photos tagged by users to be associated with other objects in the socialnetworking system, events, groups or applications. In some embodiments,objects are received from third-party applications or third-partyapplications separate from the social networking system 140. Content“items” represent single pieces of content that are represented asobjects in the social networking system 140. Users of the socialnetworking system 140 are encouraged to communicate with each other byposting text and content items of various types of media through variouscommunication channels, increasing the interaction of users with eachother and increasing the frequency with which users interact within thesocial networking system.

Social networking system users transmit text content to each other usinga variety of communication types. The text content is stored in thecontent store 210 and associated with the user sending the text contentand the one or more users receiving the text content. A communicationtype may be associated with the stored text content. Examples ofcommunication types include status updates, notes, comments, posts andmessages. A status update is text data provided by a user that isincluded in the user's user profile and as stories in news feedspresented to other users connected to the user. Similarly, a note islonger or more detailed text data provided by the user that is includedin the user's user profile and as stories in news feeds presented toother users connected to the user. A post is text that a user places ona profile of an additional user connected to the user; a post istypically visible to users connected to the user and/or users connectedto the additional user. Comments are data posted based on previouslyposted content, such as status updates, notes or actions previouslytaken by a user. Messages are text sent from a user to another user;messages are visible to the user sending the message and the userreceiving the message.

Communication types differ from each other in a variety of ways. Forexample, messages have smaller, more carefully chosen audiences thanstatus updates. As another example, notes are typically longer thanother communication types. These differences allow messages havingdifferent communication types to provide different information aboutpersonality characteristics of users.

The action logger 215 receives communications about user actions onand/or off the social networking system 140, populating the action log220 with information about user actions. Such actions may include, forexample, adding a connection to another user, sending a message toanother user, uploading an image, reading a message from another user,viewing content associated with another user, attending an event postedby another user, among others. In some embodiments, the action logger215 identifies interaction between a social networking system user and abrand page within the social networking system 140, which communicatestargeting criteria associated with content on the brand page to acontent selector to customize content from the brand page. In addition,a number of actions described in connection with other objects aredirected at particular users, so these actions are associated with thoseusers as well. These actions are stored in the action log 220.

The action log 220 may be used by the social networking system 140 totrack user actions on the social networking system 140, as well asexternal website that communicate information to the social networkingsystem 140. Users may interact with various objects on the socialnetworking system 140, including commenting on posts, sharing links, andchecking-in to physical locations via a mobile device, accessing contentitems or other interactions. Information describing these actions isstored in the action log 220. Additional examples of interactions withobjects on the social networking system 140 included in the action log220 include commenting on a photo album, communications between users,becoming a fan of a musician, adding an event to a calendar, joining agroups, becoming a fan of a brand page, creating an event, authorizingan application, using an application and engaging in a transaction.Additionally, the action log 220 records a user's interactions withadvertisements on the social networking system 140 as well as otherapplications operating on the social networking system 140. In someembodiments, data from the action log 220 is used to infer interests orpreferences of the user, augmenting the interests included in the userprofile and allowing a more complete understanding of user preferences.

The action log 220 may also store user actions taken on externalwebsites. For example, an e-commerce website that primarily sellssporting equipment at bargain prices may recognize a user of a socialnetworking system 140 through social plug-ins that enable the e-commercewebsite to identify the user of the social networking system 140.Because users of the social networking system 140 are uniquelyidentifiable, e-commerce websites, such as this sporting equipmentretailer, may use the information about these users as they visit theirwebsites. The action log 220 records data about these users, includingwebpage viewing histories, advertisements that were engaged, purchasesmade, and other patterns from shopping and buying.

In one embodiment, an edge store 230 stores the information describingconnections between users and other objects on the social networkingsystem 140 in edge objects. Some edges may be defined by users, allowingusers to specify their relationships with other users. For example,users may generate edges with other users that parallel the users'real-life relationships, such as friends, co-workers, partners, and soforth. Other edges are generated when users interact with objects in thesocial networking system 140, such as expressing interest in a page onthe social networking system, sharing a link with other users of thesocial networking system, and commenting on posts made by other users ofthe social networking system.

The edge store 230 stores edge objects that include information aboutthe edge, such as affinity scores for objects, interests, and otherusers. Affinity scores may be computed by the social networking system140 over time to approximate a user's affinity for an object, interest,and other users in the social networking system 140 based on the actionsperformed by the user. A user's affinity may be computed by the socialnetworking system 140 over time to approximate a user's affinity for anobject, interest, and other users in the social networking system 140based on the actions performed by the user. Computation of affinity isfurther described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/978,265, filedon Dec. 23, 2010, which is hereby incorporated by reference in itsentirety. Multiple interactions between a user and a specific object maybe stored in one edge object in the edge store 230, in one embodiment.In some embodiments, connections between users may be stored in the userprofile store 205, or the user profile store 205 may access the edgestore 230 to determine connections between users.

The user personality estimator 235 determines one or more personalitycharacteristics of a user based on textual content generated by the userfrom the content store 210 and information from the user profile store205. Linguistic data associated with the user is determined by analyzingtext content generated by the user. This allows the user personalityestimator 235 to account for the different audiences and informationincluded in messages having different communication types. To maximizethe amount of linguistic data associated with the user, messagesassociated with multiple communication types are retrieved from thecontent store 210 and analyzed. In one embodiment, the user personalityestimator 235 determines a count of words or word stems in the retrievedmessages that are in a plurality of categories. For example, the userpersonality estimator 235 determines the number of word stems, such aspronouns, emotion words, and words related to specific categories, inmessages associated with the user that are in categories of theLinguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) data set; however, any suitabledictionary may be used in various embodiments. As another example, oneor more matrices are constructed based on unigram or n-gram countsobtained from the messages associated with the user.

One or more models are applied to the linguistic data and to the dataretrieved from the user profile for the user personality estimator 235to determine one or more personality characteristics of the user. Forexample, an elastic net combining L1 and L2 penalties is applied to thelinguistic data and the information from the user profile for the userto determine a likelihood that the user has one or more personalitycharacteristics. Examples of personality characteristics includeextroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability andopenness; however, other personality characteristics may be determined.One or more of the models applied by the user personality estimator 235may be trained based on data received from a training group of usersbased on survey information including questions about personalitycharacteristics. One or more personality characteristics determined forthe user are stored in the user's user profile and may subsequently beused for selection of content presented to the user. The userpersonality estimator 235 is further described below in conjunction withFIG. 3.

The web server 240 links the social networking system 140 via thenetwork 120 to the one or more client devices 110, as well as to the oneor more third party websites 130. The web server 240 serves web pages,as well as other web-related content, such as Java, Flash, XML and soforth. The web server 240 may provide the functionality of receiving androuting messages between the social networking system 140 and the clientdevice 110, for example, instant messages, queued messages (e.g.,email), text and SMS (short message service) messages, or messages sentusing any other suitable messaging technique. A user may send a requestto the web server 240 to upload information, for example, images orvideos that are stored in the content store 210. Additionally, the webserver 240 may provide API functionality to send data directly to nativeclient device operating systems, such as IOS®, ANDROID™, WEBOS® or RIM.

Determining Social Networking System User Personality Characteristics

FIG. 3 shows a flow chart of one embodiment of a method 300 for methodfor determining social networking system user personalitycharacteristics. In one embodiment, the user personality estimator 235identifies a user of a social networking system 140 and retrieves textcommunications generated by the user from a content store 210. Forexample, the user personality estimator 235 retrieves text contentgenerated by the user and having one or more communication types fromthe content store 210. As described above in conjunction with FIG. 2,examples of communication types include status updates, notes, comments,posts and messages. Retrieving a plurality of communication typesassociated with the user allows the user personality estimator 235 toincrease the amount of linguistic data for the user and to account forthe different audiences for the different communication types. Theretrieved content may be limited to content generated within aparticular time range, such as a year or multiple months.

The user personality estimator 235 extracts 305 linguistic data from theretrieved communications. For example, the user personality estimator235 determines a count of words or word stems in the retrieved messagesthat are in a plurality of categories. For example, the user personalityestimator 235 determines the number of word stems, such as pronouns,emotion words, and words related to specific categories, in messagesassociated with the user that are in categories of the LinguisticInquiry and Word Count (LIWC) data set; however, any other suitable dataset or combination of data sets may be used. The number of word stems ineach of the categories may be used as the linguistic data for the user.For example, the number of word stems in each category and the totalword stem count may be used to determine proportions of word stemsmatching various categories. As another example, one or more matricesare constructed based on features determined from unigram or n-gramcounts obtained from the retrieved text content associated with theuser.

In some embodiments, the text content associated with the user may bepre-processed to improve linguistic data extraction. For example,proportions of word stems in each category or proportions of each wordout of the total number of word stems or words included in the retrievedtext content are determined. Proportions for categories may be replacedby fitted values derived from a logistic regression where category, userand user-category pair are provided as random effects predictingproportions. Alternatively, the user personality estimator 235 mayperform topic modeling, such as latent Dirichlet allocation, to thelinguistic data from the retrieved communications to allow inference ofpersonality characteristics from the linguistic data withoutpreprocessing.

The user personality estimator 235 retrieves 310 characteristics of theuser from the corresponding user profile in the user profile store 205.Examples of characteristics retrieved 310 from the user profile include:age, gender, number of additional users connected to the user,percentage of connections to other users initiated by the user, presenceof a profile picture in the user profile, number of times the useraccesses the social networking system 140 within a specified timeinterval, number of communications from the user having differentcommunication types, frequency with which the user creates differentcommunication types, total number of communications generated by theuser, percentage of communications generated by the user havingdifferent communication types and number of unique days the usergenerated text content having various communication types. However, anysuitable characteristics may be retrieved 310 from the user profile.

Based on the extracted linguistic data and the retrievedcharacteristics, one or models implemented by the user personalityestimator 235 determine 315 personality characteristics of the user. Inone embodiment, statistical models are applied to the linguistic dataand the retrieved characteristics to determine 315 levels the user hasof personality characteristics selected from a set of personalitycharacteristics. For example, the statistical models determine 315levels the user has of one or more of extraversion, agreeableness,conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness as personalitycharacteristics. In one embodiment, a Spearman rank correlation analysisof the linguistic data is performed, allowing correlations betweenpersonality characteristics and word stem category proportions from thetext content generated by the user to identify likely personalitycharacteristics. One or more models may also augment the rankcorrelation analysis of linguistic data with one or more of thecharacteristics retrieved 310 from the user profile. In one embodiment,an elastic net combining L1 and L2 penalties is applied to thelinguistic data and the retrieved characteristics.

One or more of the models used by the user personality estimator 235 maybe trained based on information received from a set of training users.For example, the user personality estimator 235 sends a survey to usersin the set of training users and responses received from the trainingset of users provide information about user personality characteristics.In one embodiment, the survey includes two items associated withdifferent personality characteristics and prompts users in the trainingset to agree or disagree with the application of two adjectives to theusers by selecting from a group of responses. Each response may beassigned a value and the values for each personality characteristic areused to determine personality characteristics of users in the trainingset. After determining personality characteristics of users in thetraining set, text content generated by each user in the training setand characteristics associated with each user in the training set areanalyzed, with the resulting communication behavior indicatingcharacteristics and linguistic data for users having various personalitycharacteristics.

Based on correlations between personality characteristics andcombinations of linguistic features and the retrieved characteristics,the user personality estimator 235 identifies one or more personalitycharacteristics the user is likely to have. For example, personalitycharacteristics associated with at least a threshold value by one ormore models are associated with the user. In some embodiments, one ormore models used by the user personality estimator 235 account forinformation about other users connected to the user when determining 315levels of personality characteristics associated with the user. Forexample, a model accounts for content from one or more other users towhich text data from the user responds when using linguistic data todetermine 315 personality characteristics of the user. As anotherexample, overlap in word usage between the user and other usersconnected to the user is a factor in determination of the user'spersonality characteristics. Any other suitable information about otherusers of the social networking system may be included in one or moremodels to determine 315 levels of personality characteristics for theuser.

The one or more personality characteristics determined 315 by the userpersonality estimator are stored 320 in the user profile associated withthe user. In one embodiment, the user personality estimator 235identifies a probability distribution of personality characteristics theuser is likely to have from the linguistic features and the retrievedcharacteristics, and the probability distribution of personalitycharacteristics is stored 320 in the user profile of the user. Storingthe distribution of personality characteristics allows the socialnetworking system 140 to account for uncertainty in determination of theuser's personality characteristics by storing 320 levels of personalitycharacteristics that the user is likely to have as well as storing 320alternative levels of personality characteristics that the user mayhave.

The social networking system 140 uses the personality characteristicsassociated with the user to select 325 additional content for the user.For example, a user's personality characteristics may be used along withother user information, such as affinities, to select stories forinclusion in the user's newsfeed, to select advertisements forpresentation to the user, or to select recommendations of actions forthe user to perform with the social networking system 140. As anotherexample, stored personality characteristics may be used as targetingcriteria for advertisers, allowing advertisement selection to accountfor particular personality characteristics to increase the likelihoodthat the user accesses or otherwise positively interacts with a selectedadvertisement. For example, the product presented in an advertisementmay be modified based on one or more of the personality characteristicsstored in the user profile.

Additionally, personality characteristics associated with the user maybe used to select 325 content for other users of the social networkingsystem 140. For example, the user's personality characteristics may beused to determine whether content associated with the user isdistributed to other users connected to the user. In one embodiment, theuser's personality characteristics may be used to determine whetherstories describing actions by the user are included in a news feed ofanother user or used to determine the location of a story describing anaction by the user in the other user's news feed. As another example,the user's personality characteristics may be used when selectingsuggested actions for other users that involve the user; as a specificexample, the user's personality characteristics may be used to determinewhether to recommend that an additional user establish a connection withthe user in the social networking system 140.

SUMMARY

The foregoing description of the embodiments of the invention has beenpresented for the purpose of illustration; it is not intended to beexhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise forms disclosed.Persons skilled in the relevant art can appreciate that manymodifications and variations are possible in light of the abovedisclosure.

Some portions of this description describe the embodiments of theinvention in terms of algorithms and symbolic representations ofoperations on information. These algorithmic descriptions andrepresentations are commonly used by those skilled in the dataprocessing arts to convey the substance of their work effectively toothers skilled in the art. These operations, while describedfunctionally, computationally, or logically, are understood to beimplemented by computer programs or equivalent electrical circuits,microcode, or the like. Furthermore, it has also proven convenient attimes, to refer to these arrangements of operations as modules, withoutloss of generality. The described operations and their associatedmodules may be embodied in software, firmware, hardware, or anycombinations thereof.

Any of the steps, operations, or processes described herein may beperformed or implemented with one or more hardware or software modules,alone or in combination with other devices. In one embodiment, asoftware module is implemented with a computer program productcomprising a computer-readable medium containing computer program code,which can be executed by a computer processor for performing any or allof the steps, operations, or processes described.

Embodiments of the invention may also relate to an apparatus forperforming the operations herein. This apparatus may be speciallyconstructed for the required purposes, and/or it may comprise ageneral-purpose computing device selectively activated or reconfiguredby a computer program stored in the computer. Such a computer programmay be stored in a non-transitory, tangible computer readable storagemedium, or any type of media suitable for storing electronicinstructions, which may be coupled to a computer system bus.Furthermore, any computing systems referred to in the specification mayinclude a single processor or may be architectures employing multipleprocessor designs for increased computing capability.

Embodiments of the invention may also relate to a product that isproduced by a computing process described herein. Such a product maycomprise information resulting from a computing process, where theinformation is stored on a non-transitory, tangible computer readablestorage medium and may include any embodiment of a computer programproduct or other data combination described herein.

Finally, the language used in the specification has been principallyselected for readability and instructional purposes, and it may not havebeen selected to delineate or circumscribe the inventive subject matter.It is therefore intended that the scope of the invention be limited notby this detailed description, but rather by any claims that issue on anapplication based hereon. Accordingly, the disclosure of the embodimentsof the invention is intended to be illustrative, but not limiting, ofthe scope of the invention, which is set forth in the following claims.

What is claimed is:
 1. A computer-implemented method comprising:providing a survey to a training set including a plurality of users of asocial networking system, the survey including a plurality of itemsassociated with one or more personality characteristics; receivingresponses to the survey from responding users in the training set;determining one or more personality characteristics associated with eachof the responding users based on the received responses; extractinglinguistic data from text content retrieved from the social networkingsystem generated by the responding users; retrieving characteristicsassociated with the responding users from user profiles from the socialnetworking system associated with the responding users, wherein thecharacteristics associated with the responding users are selected from agroup consisting of: an age, a gender, a number of additional usersconnected to the user, a percentage of connections to other usersinitiated by the user, a presence of a profile picture in the userprofile, a number of times the user accesses the social networkingsystem within a specified time interval, a number of communications fromthe user having different communication types, a frequency with whichthe user creates different communication types, total number ofcommunications generated by the user, a percentage of communicationsgenerated by the user having different types of communication, a numberof unique days the user generated communications having various types ofcommunication, and any combination thereof; for each of at least asubset of the responding users, associating linguistic data based ontext content generated by the responding user and characteristicsassociated with the responding user with one or more personalitycharacteristics associated with the responding user; and generating amodel determining one or more personality characteristics of a userbased on linguistic data associated with the user and characteristicsassociated with the user based on the associating.
 2. Thecomputer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the one or morepersonality characteristics are selected from a group consisting of:extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability,openness, and any combination thereof.
 3. The computer-implementedmethod of claim 1, further comprising: extracting linguistic data from aplurality of types of text communications between the user and one ormore additional users of the social networking system; retrieving one ormore characteristics of the user from a user profile maintained by thesocial networking system and associated with the user; applying thegenerated model to the extracted linguistic data and the retrieved oneor more characteristics of the user; storing the one or more personalitycharacteristics determined by the generated model in the user profileassociated with the user; and presenting content to the user based atleast in part on the determined one or more personality characteristicsof the user.
 4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, whereinpresenting content to the user based at least in part on the determinedone or more personality characteristics of the user comprises: selectingone or more stories for inclusion in a news feed presented to the userbased at least in part on the determined one or more personalitycharacteristics of the user; and presenting the selected one or morestories to the user in the news feed.
 5. The computer-implemented methodof claim 3, wherein presenting content to the user based at least inpart on the determined one or more personality characteristics of theuser comprises: selecting one or more advertisements for presentation tothe user based at least in part on the determined one or morepersonality characteristics of the user; and presenting the selected oneor more advertisements to the user.
 6. The computer-implemented methodof claim 5, wherein selecting one or more advertisements forpresentation to the user based at least in part on the determined one ormore personality characteristics of the user comprises: selectingadvertisements associated with one or more targeting criteria matchingat least one of the determined personality characteristics of the user.7. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein presentingcontent to the user based at least in part on the determined one or morepersonality characteristics of the user comprises: selecting one or morerecommendations for actions to the user based at least in part on thedetermined one or more personality characteristics of the user; andpresenting the selected one or more recommendations for actions to theuser.
 8. A computer program product comprising a non-transitorycomputer-readable storage medium having stored thereon programminginstructions which when executed by a processor perform a method to:provide a survey to a training set including a plurality of users of asocial networking system, the survey including a plurality of itemsassociated with one or more personality characteristics; receiveresponses to the survey from responding users in the training set;determine one or more personality characteristics associated with eachof the responding users based on the received responses; extractlinguistic data from text content retrieved from the social networkingsystem generated by the responding users; retrieve characteristicsassociated with the responding users from user profiles from the socialnetworking system associated with the responding users, wherein thecharacteristics associated with the responding users are selected from agroup consisting of: an age, a gender, a number of additional usersconnected to the user, a percentage of connections to other usersinitiated by the user, a presence of a profile picture in the userprofile, a number of times the user accesses the social networkingsystem within a specified time interval, a number of communications fromthe user having different communication types, a frequency with whichthe user creates different communication types, total number ofcommunications generated by the user, a percentage of communicationsgenerated by the user having different types of communication, a numberof unique days the user generated communications having various types ofcommunication, and any combination thereof; for each of at least asubset of the responding users, associate linguistic data based on textcontent generated by the responding user and characteristics associatedwith the responding user with one or more personality characteristicsassociated with the responding user; and generate a model determiningone or more personality characteristics of a user based on linguisticdata associated with the user and characteristics associated with theuser based on the associating.
 9. The computer program product of claim8, wherein the one or more personality characteristics are selected froma group consisting of: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness,emotional stability, openness, and any combination thereof.
 10. Thecomputer program product of claim 8, further comprising: extractinglinguistic data from a plurality of types of text communications betweenthe user and one or more additional users of the social networkingsystem; retrieving one or more characteristics of the user from a userprofile maintained by the social networking system and associated withthe user; applying the generated model to the extracted linguistic dataand the retrieved one or more characteristics of the user; storing theone or more personality characteristics determined by the generatedmodel in the user profile associated with the user; and presentingcontent to the user based at least in part on the determined one or morepersonality characteristics of the user.
 11. The computer programproduct of claim 10, wherein presenting content to the user based atleast in part on the determined one or more personality characteristicsof the user comprises: selecting one or more stories for inclusion in anews feed presented to the user based at least in part on the determinedone or more personality characteristics of the user; and presenting theselected one or more stories to the user in the news feed.
 12. Thecomputer program product of claim 10, wherein presenting content to theuser based at least in part on the determined one or more personalitycharacteristics of the user comprises: selecting one or moreadvertisements for presentation to the user based at least in part onthe determined one or more personality characteristics of the user; andpresenting the selected one or more advertisements to the user.
 13. Thecomputer program product of claim 12, wherein selecting one or moreadvertisements for presentation to the user based at least in part onthe determined one or more personality characteristics of the usercomprises: selecting advertisements associated with one or moretargeting criteria matching at least one of the determined personalitycharacteristics of the user.
 14. The computer program product of claim10, wherein presenting content to the user based at least in part on thedetermined one or more personality characteristics of the usercomprises: selecting one or more recommendations for actions to the userbased at least in part on the determined one or more personalitycharacteristics of the user; and presenting the selected one or morerecommendations for actions to the user.